Weeklong Lunar New Year holiday begins in China

Asian Economic News, Feb 14, 2005

BEIJING, Feb. 8 Kyodo

China kicked off its annual seven-day break for Lunar New Year on Tuesday after a month of mass travel for family reunion.

Over the following seven days, most work units give employees time off. The holiday is preceded by about a month of travel, particularly among university students on semester break as well as migrant workers.

China Central TV reported that Chinese transportation departments have logged 680 million trips over the past two weeks. Most people take trains, but in the Pearl River Delta region in the south, around Shanghai and in the Beijing-Tianjin area, road trips are also common. Chinese airlines have moved 4 million people over the past six weeks, CCTV said.

With most of the estimated 3 million migrant workers gone from Beijing, from Monday hundreds of construction sites sat motionless and traffic flowed without normal weekday traffic jams.

But Beijing Railway Station is full of travelers, with ticket lines on Monday evening extending across the station plaza. Railway prices have gone up and seats are hard to get despite extra rains.

Wang Yinqiu, 45, a farmer from Heilongjiang Province, stood inside the station waiting for a ticket scalper after the ticket window said she could not get on the Tuesday night train home. She hoped the scalper would not charge too much extra.

''Maybe it's a little bit, just a little bit,'' said Wang, who came to Beijing in search of work. ''For a farmer, every bit counts.''

Wang expected a standing-room-only ticket for the 15-hour ride and planned to grab any seat vacated by another passenger.

Passengers said they face about the same conditions before Lunar New Year every year.

Another travel rush is expected after Feb. 15, when the weeklong holiday ends, to get people back to work or school.